Flat Earth And The Radicalising Effects Of YouTube

There are increasingly frequent moments where the notion of the 'American Dream' — if you can dream it, you can be it, or build it — seems to have been distorted into an alternative reality where, if you believe something in America, it must be true. Even if there is absolutely no evidence to support this belief; or, as is often the case, there is a mountain of evidence contradicting your belief.

As a case study into yet another facet of our so-called post-truth society, this article in the The New Yorker explores the apparent evidence and meets several adherents of modern-day (mostly) American flat-earthers. They do so by visiting a Flat Earth convention and watching several of the 'documentaries' supposedly proving the flatness of our Earth through online videos and home-made science experiments.

The use of videos to spread Flat Earth and other truther-type conspiracy theories seems important, and it is. As author and researcher Zeynep Tufekci pointed out some months ago in an op-ed in the New York Times, YouTube's own algorithm is designed to present increasingly radicalised videos on specific themes, escalating the message of the content in an attempt to keep viewer engagement high.

The New Yorker piece adds further perspective to how the language and society of conspiracy is gamed, the constant pseudo-scientific sleights-of-hand that are used to argue that, if this tiny thing is not true, then all things are untrue, and there is no truth. It's a rabbit hole of uncertainty, which could perhaps be seen as a symptom of many people's genuine struggle to understand the large and sometimes quite crazy world. For others, it's an opportunity to gain followers, possibly even make some money, or both. Which goes to show, when it comes to human nature, there's little new under the sun.